Happy Stories
by ellaatthedisco
Summary: "Do you have any happy stories?" Episode tag to 2.04 Oliver asks Felicity to help him delete the footage of Sara in the storage room.


He's waiting for her when she comes in. Well, not waiting for her specifically, necessarily. But he's waiting for something – or he's just completely checked out. Felicity finds herself suddenly hyper aware of the sound of her heels against the concrete of the club basement, tapping out a rhythm that bounces off the walls and fills her ears. Oliver doesn't even shift in his seat at the computer consoles and Felicity decides that he's definitely deep in thought.

At this realization, she allows herself more time to make her way over to him. She stops to remove her coat and toss it over an empty steel table, placing her bag on top of it. The buttons of her coat making clacking noises as they hit the metal and her purse drops down with a dull thud but still Oliver doesn't move. She hesitates still, fearing she's intruding on something personal she has no business being in, and pulls at the ends of her sleeves until they cover her hand up to her knuckles.

When she can find no more excuse to stay on her side of the room, she slowly makes her way toward what she is beginning to think might actually be an Oliver-shaped statue John has set up as a joke. At about a foot away, he turns so abruptly in her swivel chair she nearly jumps in surprise. She holds it together well, though, she thinks, as he turns blue eyes on her and she immediately decides she had been invading on a private moment.

The realization almost makes her turn and run, apology halfway to her mouth, before he speaks.

"Hey." It's gentle but his voice is rough and she doesn't think she wants to know what sort of memory he'd been engulfed in. "I was waiting for you." She studies him for a moment, suddenly realizing that the computer monitors aren't even turned on. She raises her eyebrows at him as he stands from her chair and offers it to her.

"What do you need?" She asks, sliding into the chair and trying to focus on booting up the monitors and not his hand on her shoulder, the pads of his fingers resting just beyond where the neck of her shirt ends. She hasn't yet decided if his touchiness since his second time on the island is a gift or a curse. It feels like both.

"Could you hack into Verdant's security footage? The camera in the storage room? I need you to delete something for me," he explains and she nods already pulling up the footage. The computers connected to the same network, so it doesn't actually involve a whole lot of "hacking" in the first place. But she decides not to correct him.

"Uh, sure. But couldn't you just do that yourself? I mean, it is your club," she points out, turning to look up at him as the footage loads. He gives her a sheepish smirk and a one shouldered shrug.

"I don't know how," he admits and Felicity can't help but chuckle.

"Seriously, how did you manage to do anything without me?" He rolls his eyes and she returns her attention to the screen.

"I just need you to delete it before Thea can see it."

"In the storage room? Sounds kinky." She doesn't mean to say it, really. It was only supposed to be a passing thought. Why she's still surprised when those slip out, she's not sure. But her face scrunches up and she hears Oliver chuckle but doesn't bother backtracking.

"What time?" She asks pushing her hair back behind her ear. Oliver pulls another chair up next to her and sits down.

"Not sure, exactly. Sometime after two." Felicity nods in acknowledgment and starts the recording at 14:00 hours and puts it on fast forward. She sits back and they watch in silence as tiny Oliver moves in and out of the storage room, checking things off on a clipboard. At 15:00 the storage room is dark and Oliver has ceased entering and exiting and Felicity can't take the silence anymore.

"So, do you?" She asks quietly, keeping her focus on the screen even as she feels Oliver's eyes on her. "Have any happy stories, I mean?" She turns to him after he's quiet for a moment and, as he's still staring at her, immediately feels like an idiot.

"I mean, not on the island, or wherever else you were, of course," she backtracks. "That was a stupid question earlier, sorry. I mean, you know, sometimes I speak before I think and it comes out wrong or backwards. Well, you know that better than anyone, probably." She stops talking when she realizes he's smiling and shaking his head. And she promptly wishes the earth would just swallow her up right there and make her shut up.

"Yeah," he shrugs, "I mean, of course I do. They're just more like.. a different persons stories now. As if I heard them second hand years ago. They're kind of fuzzy." Felicity nods and she knows she should let that be the end of it but then, of course, she wouldn't be Felicity.

"Do you want to tell me one?" She asks, returning her attention to the screen just in time to see little Oliver dragging a little blond woman in a baseball cap into the storage room. She let's it play, gauging how long the exchange went on and just how much she'll have to cut. She's a little surprised when Oliver does start telling her a story.

"When we were sixteen," he starts and she can already hear the smile in his voice and it makes her stomach flip a little, "Tommy, Laurel, and I are hanging out in my room and, you know, Tommy's snuck whatever out of his dad's liquor cabinet – I don't even remember what it was anymore." Felicity deletes the offending security footage and turns her full attention on him, resting her chin in her palm on the desk.

"So, Tommy and I, we think we're bad, so, this isn't new for us. It's the first time we've gotten Laurel to join though and she was, well, kind of a lightweight. But she wants to prove she can go just as hard as we can so she's keeping up with us and is just completely wasted. And Laurel, she's known what she's wanted to do since she was twelve, so she's wasted and just spouting facts about the judicial system." He stops to chuckle at the memory and Felicity can't help but grin at the mirth on his face.

"So, Laurel's spouting facts, Tommy is just shouting nonsense at her trying to throw her off, and we're all pretty drunk. But, apparently, none of us bothered to lock the door."

"Oh no," Felicity laughs, her hand covering her mouth.

"Yeah, and in walks little six-year-old Thea with about a billion questions about, you know, what we're doing, and what we're drinking, and if she can have some, and why Laurel is acting so weird." At this point, he's grinning so wide if Felicity saw it in any other context she might have thought it was the mask he put on to play Oliver Queen but it's so genuine her heart leaps at the sight of it. "Laurel is far too wasted to be of any help, so, Tommy and I are sitting there wasted trying to explain to a six-year-old why she can't have any of our 'special juice' and praying to God she doesn't try to ask my mom about it." Felicity lets out a laugh and covers her face with her hands, trying to imagine a sixteen-year-old Oliver wasted and debating with a six-year-old.

"Oh my God," she laughs, "did she?"

"Ask my mom? Oh, yeah! But I was such a mess by then all my mom could do was shake her head and tell me what I bad influence I was being," he chuckles, shaking his head. His attention returns to the computer screen and he looks at her quizzically.

"The footage?"

"Oh, gone," she smirks. He stares at her for a minute before smirking back.

"You're good."

"Yeah, that's what they tell me," she shrugs, turning back to the computer and exiting out of the footage. She turns back to him abruptly and studies him for a moment.

"What?" He asks, raising an eyebrow at her sudden change.

"I know that I'll never begin to imagine what you went through those five years," she says quietly and his eyes fall to his lap, "and I know that things haven't been great since you got back and being 'wasted sixteen-year-old' happy seems like an impossible thing to feel again, but I hope you don't give up on happiness just because it seems impossible right now. I may have only known you for a short while, but I can't imagine someone more deserving of happy than you." His eyes drift back up to hers and she realizes he's smiling again so she decides she must have said something right.

"That's funny," he murmurs. "Do you know what your name means, Felicity?" She looks at him quizzically. Of all her random knowledge and she'd never bothered to look up the meaning of her own name. She supposed it was something a lot of kids do at some point or another but it'd always just been a name to her.

"Happiness." She smiles and raises an eyebrow at him.

"What's that supposed to mean?" He just shrugs at her and drops his gaze again. It's quiet for a minute before Felicity sighs and shakes her head.

"Well, regardless, I just hope you never count yourself out of happiness, Oliver." And before she can over think it or say too much and ruin it, she leans forward and places a kiss to his forehead. She stands up and his eyes follow her up and she can feel them on her as she moves back towards her bag.

"So," she says suddenly, turning to face him with her cell phone in hand, "do you want to order take out or something? I'm starving."


End file.
